Office Hours with the Brofessor

Tuesday, October 10, 2017

So, last week (ed.: month!) we talked about Australopithecus, and how over time this genus became more and more
gracile, relying on tools and problem-solving to get access to a variety of
food sources. We even have an assemblage
of stone tools that appear to have been manufactured by Australopithecus, and the astonishing Makapansgat pebble
demonstrates even a flicker of abstract thought. As time passed, some of these creatures
became distinct enough that we begin to refer to them as members of the genus Homo, or “man”, under the premise that
by this point, they had become more like us than like Australopithecus. The very
oldest find that could be reasonably argued to have Homo traits is the unassumingly named “LD-350-1” mandible, found in
Ethiopia and dating from around 2.7 to 2.8 MYA:

So, what were these first Homo creatures like? Well,
at the beginning, they probably weren’t that different from their
australopithecine brethren. They have
been traditionally referred to as Homo
habilis by science, traditionally translated “handy man”. Here’s what they looked like:

There
are a lot of reconstructions out there, of course, but I’m inclined in my
layman’s opinion to favor the ones that look more ape-like, since these guys
were very much a transitional species. It’s
also important to note that by this time, human ancestors probably hadn’t lost their body hair yet, although the process may
have been underway(1).

In
fact, habilis displays so many
archaic, australopithecine features that some scientists are arguing for a new
classification to what they would call Australopithecus
habilis(2). But I don’t really know enough about this
debate to have an opinion on it.

Let’s
talk about what the behavior of these creatures may have been like. A good place to start may be the toolkit they
left behind for us. Nowadays, we refer
to the tools made by Homo habilis as
the Oldowan industry, named after Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge. I remember it like this: the OLDowan industry is really OLD! Dohohoho!

Sorry.

These are the oldest manufactured items that
we have ever found; it cannot be repeated enough that, an unimaginably long
time ago, our ancestors held these very
stones in their hands and fashioned them into crude choppers and scrapers:

Here we
see a typical Oldowan chopper tool. As
we can see, there’s not a lot of complexity to it—it’s really just a rock that
they hit with another rock until they had a sharp edge to work with. Some background knowledge was necessary—the
toolmakers needed to know where, and at what angle, to strike in order to
produce a sharp edge. Regardless, as we
can see, there is a haphazard quality to these tools, and they were made with a
kind of strict practicality in mind.
These objects are functional, not aesthetic, and from this I infer that
their makers probably didn’t give a whole lot of thought to things beyond
simple survival. When I look at these
simple tools, I cannot imagine that, finding myself among a band of H. habilis, I would find myself feeling
much more at home than among a band of australopithicines.

But
even at this stage, there may have been some behavioral quality to these guys
that set them apart from Australopithecus. Their brains were about 50% larger(2),
and while that doesn’t necessarily
mean they were smarter—however “smart” may be defined—they certainly could have
been. This difference in cognitive
ability could have manifested itself as more “pickiness” in selecting rocks for
use as tools, or as more of a tendency toward teamwork in accomplishing tasks,
as opposed to intra-group competition.
Food could have been obtained in more innovative ways, such as by
waiting for predators to bring down an animal, scaring the predators away, and
taking the meat for themselves. On the
other hand, this competition with predators over carcasses may also explain why
habilis, in contrast to later humans,
was a “staple in the diet of larger predatory animals”(3). To me this suggests that they still had a way
to go in terms of outsmarting their predators.

If I were given the opportunity to
observe a living habilis community, I
would do so more as a primatologist than as an anthropologist. Their behavior certainly would have been more
humanlike than that of chimpanzees, but probably not by much. It’s doubtful that one of us could sit down
with a habilis and interact with it
in the same way we interact with one another, even by a long shot.

Safety would be a concern,
too. Primatologists are very rigorously trained in interpreting
great ape behavior before going into the field, because great apes can be
unpredictable and dangerous.
Behaviorally modern humans are the product of millions of years of
social evolution that allows us to be around people we don’t know without
killing each other. Habilis was only beginning this process.

One
very important issue regarding habilis is
where exactly they fit in the story of human evolution. Were they our direct ancestors, or were they
part of an evolutionary line that branched off from ours earlier on? If they are not our ancestors, did they have
descendants who were distinct from us?
The first question cannot be answered now, but in recent years,
incredible discoveries have been made that seem to imply that habilis founded a separate Homo lineage, developing entirely
independently of our own, that persisted to an astonishingly recent date. I don’t want to go any further, because that
would ruin the awesome twist ending, but stay tuned, because it’s gonna blow
your mind.

So
that’s it for Homo habilis. Next time we’re going to talk about Homo ergaster and Homo erectus, two species that would ultimately give rise to our
lineage. We’re even going to look at a
couple specimens of these guys and, amazingly, reconstruct what these
individuals’ lives must have been like.
See you next time!

Sunday, August 27, 2017

But first, a disclaimer: today we’re going to be
covering a huge period, on the scale of millions of years, in just a few
minutes. That’s not because this period
is any less interesting or worthy of study than others, but because I want to
focus more on the emergence of “people” as we think of them—that is, in the
words of paleoanthropologist John Shea, behavioral variability. But to really enjoy the wonder of
“personhood’s” emergence, we need a little background information, which will
be covered in this video, and the next.
Let’s start by jumping into our Wu-Tang Elevator and going back to the
Africa of around three MYA…

So as we begin to explore our surroundings, we become
familiar with a few different creatures that belong to what we know as the
genus Australopithecus, or “Southern
Ape” in Latin. We would have seen these
guys as decidedly more chimpanzee-like than human-like, with one important
difference: Australopithecus walked
upright (1).

There were a few different species of Australopithecus, and they seem to have
been around generally between four and two MYA.
The different species show variation according to a theme that is very, very important in the study of human
origins: robustness vs. gracility. That
is, a heavier-set build as opposed to a lighter, less brawny physical
morphology. Consider, for instance, the
robust gorilla, as opposed to the gracile bonobo. Gorillas live in dense jungle, where you
don’t really need to run from anything, and rely on tough, hard-to-chew stems
and shoots (2). The forests inhabited by
the bonobo, on the other hand, are less dense, and they rely on softer,
easier-to-chew fruits (3).

Australopithecus
lived on the savanna, rather than in the forest (4), which made it necessary
for them to stand up to look out over the tall grass. Australopithecus
was therefore evolutionarily pressured by a treeless environment for greater
gracility. Since they were less brawny,
they became more reliant on tools. This
set of traits gradually led to the emergence of the genus homo about 2.8 MYA.

So what was Australopithecus
like? Most of us are familiar with
the iconic Lucy, discovered in 1974:

When
I was a little kid, I saw this picture, and mistook the jawbone for her
smiling.

When she was alive, she probably looked kind of like a
chimpanzee that stood upright:

Although Lucy is a lot more famous, we also have a
beautiful skull of an infant Australopithecus
from Ethiopia that its discoverers have named Selam, or “Peace”:

Beautiful.

Here’s what she looked like when she was alive. I actually think she was on a National Geographic cover a while back,
so maybe you’ve seen her before:

Aw, she’s so cute! I wanna give her a
hug!

When paleoanthropologists examine this wonderfully
preserved skull, along with others that we’ve found, it becomes clear that
their skulls were a lot more like those of chimpanzees than humans. For instance, their brains appear to have
been comparable in size to those of modern chimps (5). Their behavior was probably not much more
“human-like” than chimpanzees either, although it was recently discovered that
they were able to use stone tools (6):

On the other hand, there is one, very compelling,
piece of evidence that there was, even then, just a spark of something
incredible going on in the brains of these creatures. It is possible that among Australopithecus abstract thought, the
idea that one thing could represent
another thing, was already in its infancy.
At a site associated with Australopithecus
fossils in Makapansgat Cave, South Africa, an unassuming jasperite pebble was
found, which was naturally shaped in such a way that it crudely resembles a
humanlike face. Now of course, there’s
lots of natural stuff that looks like other stuff, just think of clouds in the
sky! But the eerie thing about the
Makapansgat Pebble is that it is of a geologically different composition from
the surrounding environment (7). The
nearest source of jasperite is miles away.
The chances of it somehow getting to Makapansgat by itself are astronomically,
negligibly small. It had to--and even as
I say this, I get chills up my spine—It
had to have been carried there.

The pebble is small enough to carry without any
trouble—half a pound—and could have been held easily in one hand. It would not have made a very good tool,
given its shape, and certainly not one useful enough to carry miles away from
its source. What appears to have
happened is that somewhere around 3 million years ago, an Australopithecus found
this thing, looked at it, and a synapse fired somewhere in his little monkey
mind, flashing like lightning on the horizon.
He found this pebble, thought, hey,
this looks like me—an abstract thought—and considered this interesting
enough to take back to camp to show his friends. I wish I could’ve been there to see him find
this thing. I’d give a million dollars
just to find out exactly what went through his mind, and what significance it
had.

Would you like to see it? Of course you would. Here it is: the oldest face in the world:

I love this.
When we look at this pebble, we experience exactly the same jolt of
recognition, and see exactly the same face and features, that someone saw three million years ago. Isn’t that cool? So we see, even at this early stage, the
faintest flickers and glimmers of what would, someday, make us “people”.

Next time, we’re going to talk about the transition
from Australopithecus to Homo, and what we know about the very
earliest members of our genus.

Tuesday, August 8, 2017

Hello friends, welcome to Office Hours with the
Brofessor: the Show Where I Say Things.
Today we’ll be covering part two of my “Cavemen Rule” series. We’ll ask the question of what exactly
defines a “person” from a paleoanthropological point of view.

So, I just want to start by saying that I am not a
paleoanthropologist by any means. My
background is in historical linguistics, but I do think paleoanthropology is a
cool topic, and it’s a hobby that I love sharing with people! So, I hope that if any viewers out there are
in fact anthropologists, paleo or otherwise, you’ll contribute to the
discussion with your two cents. I would
love to learn more.

Before we start, I’d like to introduce a few important
terms. In my high school biology class,
I learned the pneumonic device “King Philip Came Over For Good
Spaghetti”—Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species—for biological
taxonomy. Modern people, or homo Sapiens, therefore belong to the
genus homo, and the species Sapiens.
As far as we know, we’re the only member of our genus still around, but
in the past there were lots of others.
The most well known are homo
Habilis, extant from about 2.8 million years ago, and homo Erectus, extant from 1.9 million years ago, or, as I like to
say, “mya!” Now, that said, let’s get
something out of the way:

Got it out of your system? Good, let’s be adults here. Another well-known species was homo Neanderthalensis, or Neanderthals,
extant from about 250 thousand years ago; or, as I say, “kya!”.

So, when asking the question “what are people””, there
are a few metrics you could go by.

Biologically, you could say that a “person” is any member of the genus homo.
This includes not just our species, homo Sapiens, but our extinct ancestors and relatives.

By that definition, “people” have been around for 2.8
million years. Personally, though, I
think that definition is too broad.
Early homo, in my view, did
not have the cognitive and social abilities that characterize “people”. On the other hand, we could also define
“people” as belonging only to homo
Sapiens, but I would view that as too narrow. That definition would overlook the growing
evidence that points to other homo
species acting in a cognitively and culturally advanced way—most convincingly,
our cousins the Neanderthals.

On the other hand, let’s consider for a moment the
spiritual side of this discussion.
Personally, I am a Christian, and so that’s the basis I take for my
opinion; basically, I would say that “people” began when they were able to
fully comprehend the moral ramifications of their decisions, and, despite
knowing these ramifications, make the wrong choice—that is, in theological
terms, the Fall of Man. At what point
did we become morally responsible for our decisions? Could a homo
Erectus engage in a conversation about morality, or be prosecuted in court
for murder? How about a Neanderthal? On a similar note, I would say that “people
became people” when they became aware of the presence of the divine or
spiritual.

Finally, there’s the linguistic aspect: “people” can talk.
That is, they can use articulated language. They can speak a language that draws distinctions
between different phonemes—units of sound—and morphemes—units of meaning. These phonemes and morphemes can be put
together to construct an original utterance about whatever topic you like. An articulated language has a degree of
predictability as to word order and syntax.
Articulated languages have lexica of possible words. “Languages” can be adapted to any cultural or
situational context to articulate the entirety of the human experience. It doesn’t matter how small the lexicon is—Damin,
an extinct ceremonial language of Australia, had a lexicon of only about 150 distinct
morphemes. Neither does it matter how much
grammatical inflection* a language has—Classical Chinese has almost no
grammatical inflection at all, and very little affixation. If it can be adapted to any possible human
situation or interaction, it is a “language”.
There is no such thing as a “primitive” language. Whenever people began to use articulated
language, its speakers could have used it to talk about Shakespeare as easily
as they could have used it to talk about lighting being scary—that is, if they
had the appropriate background knowledge.

*”Inflection” refers to words changing a word for
things like tense and number, e.g. eat/ate.
This contrasts with “affixation” which refers to “adding stuff” to words
for the same purpose, for example dog/dogs.

So, to review:

·“People” are able to act in a “cognitively
and culturally advanced way”—whatever that means.

·“People” are morally responsible for their
actions.

·“People” have a sense of the spiritual or
supernatural.

·“People” can communicate using articulated
language.

The question, then, is this: when and where were the
first communities that checked off all of these boxes? The first category is especially difficult to
define. Some paleoanthropologists use
the term “behavioral modernity”, which also encompasses the other three
categories. Others, prominent among them
being the towering badass that is John Shea of Stony Brook University, have
criticized this term. In particular,
Shea prefers to use the term “behavioral variability”, which I think makes a
lot more sense. Go give his Academia.edu
page a look if you’re interested.

If we’re going to be rigidly—and, I would say,
unnecessarily—conservative with the evidence we accept, points one, three, and
four can’t really be demonstrably proven until fairly recently—the last 40,000
years or so--and point two is a philosophical question that can only be
inferred. However, every day we are
unearthing more evidence to show that people have been behaving the same way we
do now for at least 100,000 years—and even this number is being slowly pushed
back to about 200,000. There are even
tantalizing glimmers of what we would call “modern” behavior as far back as
400,000 years.

Now, I can see all my academically conservative
viewers revving up their comment boxes to type something along the lines of “ackchyually,
behavioral modernity and articulated language emerged last week”. Relax, guys.
One problem with academia these days is that a lot of experts refuse to
consider new possibilities until their refusal to accept them makes them look
ridiculous. That doesn’t mean we should
say that homo Habilis was having
philosophical discussions while they scavenged rhinoceros marrow, but on the
other hand, we should be open to the possibility that behavioral variability,
as Shea puts it, goes back further than we are currently comfortable thinking.

In my layman’s opinion, I would say that a good
estimate for the emergence of behavioral variability was about 200,000 years
ago, but there are tantalizing pieces of evidence that go back even
further. If someone asked me, “Hey Bro,
how long have people been around?” I would say, “Two hundred thousand years,
maybe a little more”, using the definition of “people” as discussed above.

So, what do you think?
Go ahead and contribute to the discussion by leaving a comment! In our next discussion we’re going to briefly
go over the early homo species that
existed before “people” in the behavioral-variability sense. See you then!

Wednesday, July 26, 2017

Hi Everybody, time for another exciting season of
Office Hours with the Brofessor: The Show Where I say things! I’ve been planning to do a new series for a
while now, and I’m finally ready to go.
Presenting: Intro to Human Origins, or: Cavemen Rule!

So
I’d like to start off this series by talking about how inconceivably badass
cavemen are. I know everyone talks about
Vikings, pirates, gladiators, and all these dudes, but for some reason people
forget about cavemen, the original badasses whence all other badasses, myself
included, were spawned. These dudes
clawed their way up from being a house lunch special on the Serengeti to mastering
the world around them, paving the way for humanity’s greatest accomplishments,
from the Pyramids of Egypt to Boston’s More
than a Feeling:

For
most of humanity’s existence, we have lived under conditions that, in popular
culture, would be described as a “caveman” mode of life—or, more accurately,
what anthropologists call band societies.
But before you get excited and start thinking that this is going to be a
rockumentary*, I have to burst your bubble and say: it’s not that kind of
band. A “band society” refers to a
mobile hunter-gatherer society of less than 100 individuals, usually no larger
than an extended family or clan. For
most of our existence as a species, this was the way we lived. Billions upon billions of people have lived
out their lives in this kind of society.
Were not their lives as precious and full of color as ours?

*Unless, of course, the "rock" in "rockumentary" refers to the stone artifacts left behind by prehistoric man!

We do seem to have this
idea that human prehistory goes a long, long way back, but I think a lot of
people don’t really have much idea of what went on during this time.Who were these people?When, where, and how did they live?Why is it that we learn about the Egyptians
and Romans, but not the Mousterians and Aurignacians?The answer, of course, is “relevance”.But like I always say: who cares about
relevance, as long as it’s badass?

These societies existed
for thousands of years, with as much drama and life as any society in written
history.And there’s just as much,
arguably, to learn, if we are able to interpret the clues correctly.Prehistoric cultures may not have left
written records, but they did leave us clues, here and there, that add up over
thousands of years.Every day we are
developing a clearer picture of how these people lived and died.

Let’s start with a few
common misconceptions that people have about the 98% of humanity’s existence
that predates the written record:

·Prehistoric people were in some way “less
human” than us: less developed, less evolved, however you want to say it:

·Prehistoric people didn’t behave the same
way we do, or had limited intelligence compared to us.

·Prehistoric people saved money on their
car insurance by switching to Geico.

·People, one day, “discovered” agriculture,
as if they didn’t know how seeds worked.

·The five thousand years of our existence
when we’ve had written history somehow matter more to the human story than any
other five-thousand-year period. They
don’t.

People are people now, people were people five thousand years ago, and people were people fifty thousand years ago.Prehistoric societies—and modern-day small-scale cultures—are just as important as any other human society—Roman, Chinese, Navajo, whatever. Another problem that
popular consciousness has with human prehistory is that most of us don’t have
much of a “timeline” for this vast, unrecorded period of our existence--for
example, I was talking with a friend once who asked me which came first: fire
or cave paintings. That’s not a stupid
question, because most of us just never learned this stuff in school. But to me, it’s a terrible betrayal of our
shared human heritage that we do not!So let’s fix that! In this series we’re going to take a trip
though prehistory, and learn about the origins of who we are as a human family.

Traditionally,
scholars have divided up human prehistory and proto-history by the materials
used for toolmaking: hence, we have the stone age, bronze age, and iron
age. Some people would also add the
“copper age” as a transitional period between the stone and bronze ages, but
these three are the most important. I’ve
always thought “stone age” was kind of a misnomer, since that implies stone was
the only, or even the dominant, material used, but people during this period
had just as much ingenuity as we do; consider, for example, that plenty of bone
artifacts have been recovered as well.
At any rate the “stone age” lasted from the very beginnings of humanity
to about five thousand years ago; the bronze age, between five and three
thousand years ago; and the iron age, from about three thousand years ago to
the emergence of written history.

Note
that this is a fairly Eurocentric way to look at protohistory; we use this
division simply because Greece and Rome developed iron technology before
consistently writing stuff down. But
just because they were late to the party doesn’t mean everyone else was;
consider that fully developed written scripts were used in Mesopotamia and
Egypt concurrently with early bronze smelting.
Hence, the terms “bronze age” and “iron age” have little true
significance to these cultures, since these periods overlap with the historical
record. In the same way, there are still
societies today that do just fine without the use of metal.

The
“stone age” concept, however flawed, is nonetheless used as a handy tool by
archaeologists to describe what they have divided into three periods:

The Paleoloithic, or “old stone age”,
which is further divided into the Lower, Middle, and Upper Paleolithic periods;

The Mesolithic, or “middle stone age”,
and;

The Neolithic, or “new stone age”.

Of these, the Mesolithic
and Neolithic pale in comparison to the enormous timescales of the Paleolithic,
which lasted from the very dawn of humanity to about ten thousand years
ago—maybe twenty in some places. This
period was characterized primarily by band societies engaging in scavenging,
foraging, and hunting of big game. The
Mesolithic is characterized, again, by band societies, but now with more
emphasis on small game, along with collection of wild cereal grains. During the Neolithic, grain took on an even
larger role as people began to settle down and develop true agriculture. Lots of people think of the Neolithic as the
beginning of what we call “civilization” but it took thousands of years of
small-scale farming before cities, metal tools, or writing developed—hence the
need for “Neolithic” as a classification.

But how old is humanity
itself? Well, that’s a difficult
question, because first you have to answer the somewhat bloated philosophical
question of “what is human?”—something we will attempt to do in our next
video. Thanks for watching!

Thursday, March 16, 2017

Aims: By the end of the lesson, students should be
able to talk about Ket household items using locative postpositions and
expressions for “to (not) be there”

Story: You have just made friends with a family of
Ket people living on the shores of the Yenisei river. You met them while they were setting up their
spring encampment. Now that their
birchbark teepee is set up, they invite you in.
Inside the air is smoky and warm.
You can distinguish a few important items belonging to the family, not
least among them the family’s guardian spirit dolls.

1.Locative: Ket locative suffix is produced by adding the
suffix -ka to a noun,
regardless of gender or number.
Therefore, we can make constructions like quska “in the tent” or hɯssejka “in the
forest”.

2.Stating the presence of nouns: Ket uses the phrase-final usaŋ
and bənsaŋ to state presence or lack of a noun. Thus, we can produce sentences like Quska
tɯ'n usaŋ/bənsaŋ “In the tent there is/is not a kettle.”

About Me

My name is the Brofessor. This is a video blog where I post lectures about subjects that interest me. Most of my sources are from Wikipedia and classes I've taken.

I have a BA in linguistics, and am currently working as an EFL teacher in Changhua, Taiwan, Republic of China. I still have a lot to learn about linguistics, however, and might disappoint any real experts who want to have a discussion with me. I am very much an amateur. Please be patient with me!

If you would like to contact me with ideas or discussion, please don't hesitate to email me at brofessorsoffice@gmail.com, or make a comment on a post. Also, if any of the points I make are incorrect, please let me know!

My languages:

--Upper Midwest American English (native)

--Standard Chinese (CEFR B1.2)

--Castillian Spanish (CEFR B1.2)

--Standard Russian (CEFR B1.1)

--Halh Mongolian (CEFR B1.1)

--Tok Pisin (CEFR A2.1)

--Southern Ket (CEFR A1.1)

I don't know much about computers, so if you want to help me make this page look better please email me.